Jason Njoku

Jason Njoku is the founder and CEO of Iroko Partners, the largest digital distributors of Nigerian music and movies, with a library of ~1600 licensed movies. Mr. Njoku’s, Iroko Partners, consist of 5 web brands; iROKOtv, iROKING, iROKtv, NollywoodLove and YorubaLove. Mr. Njoku is building a modern digital distribution infrastructure using Amazon Web Services, Ooyala and several video ad networks, to service the second largest movie industry in the world (by volume), Nollywood, or Nigerian cinema.

According to Pando Daily’s, Sarah Lacy, last year Iroko did eight million YouTube streams a month, with a $1 million revenue run-rate. But since then, his traffic has soared, but the relationship with Youtube has soured. In Njoku’s view, YouTube has become so maniacal about pleasing Hollywood and doing original, high-level US-centric programming that they just didn’t care about what someone like Iroko was doing.

“I’m not going to hide who we are,” said Mr. Njoku. “We have 71 people working for us in a country with 50% unemployment. We did $1.3 million in revenues last year. We are the largest Internet company in Lagos by nearly any definition. We want to be Nigeria’s Netscape moment.”

Earlier this year, Njoku  decided to close his YouTube channel that was generating millions in revenue in an attempt to build something even bigger. He’s in the process of migrating users and content now, so his YouTube content will still be available for a bit longer.

Mr. Njoku holds a BSc, Chemistry from The University of Manchester, University of Manchester - Manchester Business School, 2002 – 2005.